The nursery industry has long been faced with the problem of digging field-grown stock for containerization, such containers being flat-bottomed with a slight taper toward the top. Traditionally, this has been done manually with a shovel. A root-ball is dug and shaped so that it will approximate the shape and size of the container in which it is to be placed. The common mechanized way of doing the same thing has been to use a tree spade which forms a conical root ball which then has to be manually reshaped to fit the standard flat-bottomed, slightly tapered nursery containers. Both operations are time-consuming and expensive.